Defund The Police! Does that slogan scare you? Maybe it should.
As Bob Dylan sings, “You’d better start swimming or get thrown like a stone.”
Maybe that’s a judgement on you.
A huge grassroots movement has put forward the demand Defund The Police. It’s put that slogan on the lips of every American.
If the leadership of the right had been given a gift like that, they’d hammer you every day with Defund The Police! Defund the Police! Why? Because they want to win. They know better than to stand in the way of, oh, the Tea Party. They co-opted them instead. They took the forms of their demands, their slogans, and used them to get some–not all–of what they all wanted. And they won.
So just this once, can we try not backing down in advance because the mean people will say the mean things? Can we defend our leaders who are in the streets fighting for us, instead of worrying about whether Chuck Schumer (D-Wall Street) can beg enough McNuggets of funding from fat rich fucks?
Because let me tell you: Those of you quibbling about the slogan are not leading. Neither are those quibbling at the top. Not any more.
If you’d been paying attention, you’d know Defund The Police is the compromise. The true demands of the heart? More like Fuck The Police! and Chinga La Migra! I don’t know how anyone who noticed that four policemen slowly murdered a man in a public display of terror can ever have hummed along with “I Shot The Sheriff” or “Murder In My Heart For The Judge” and not feel that too.
As Mary Jane Watson told Peter Parker, “Face it, tiger–you’ve hit the jackpot!” And we have. Just look at Generation Lockdown out in the streets. They’ve been told in every possible way their lives are disposable commodities. We can’t be bothered to keep them from being mass murdered other than by traumatizing them with fake mass murder drills. We can’t worry about them getting bullied in school or ending up on the street because their parents don’t care. We sign them up for a life of debt to get a degree that has become more a job license than an education, and tell them with a straight face that debt is for their own good. We watch as those younger than ourselves fail to thrive in the environment we created for them, and blame them for it.
Now they are doing something about it. They are doing something you didn’t. Whether you couldn’t or wouldn’t or whatever doesn’t really matter now. It’s being done.
The thing is, Mary Jane Watson has done shown up, and she is rocking our world. She’s a red-headed girl who burned a police car in New York City who’ll end up in prison for it.
And right now, as you stand by and dither as she sits in jail, wondering what you are going to do about what she fights for, you have chosen to be Gwen Stacy. Your father, the kind police commissioner, is already dead, and you are the sweet, doomed past.
It’s not a perfect metaphor. It’s not a perfect world, either, so that seems fitting.
Which one matters more? Which one will you do something about?